Morals and Consent: Contractarian Solutions to Ethical Woes - Softcover

Murray, Malcolm

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0773551115 ISBN 13: 9780773551114

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017

Synopsis

How are we meant to behave? And how are we to defend whatever answer we give? Morals and Consent grounds our notion of morality in natural evolution, and from that basis, Malcolm Murray shows why contractarianism is a far more viable moral theory than is widely believed. The scope of Morals and Consent has two main parts: theory and application. In his discussion of theory, Murray defends contractarianism by appealing to evolutionary game theory and metaethical analyses. His main argument is that we are not going to find morality as an objective fact in the world, and that instead, we can understand morality as a reciprocal cooperative trait. From this minimal moral architecture, Murray derives his innovative consent principle. The application of the theory, detailing what contractarians can – or ought to – say about moral matters, takes up the greater portion of the work. Murray offers a trenchant examination of what moral constraints we can claim concerning death (abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment), sex (pornography, prostitution, and sexual assault), beneficence (toward present and future people, animals, and the environment), and liberty (genetic enhancement, organ sales, and torture). By focusing on evolutionary contractarianism and the epistemic justification of our moral claims – or lack thereof – Malcolm Murray’s Morals and Consent is a serious advance in the field of applied ethics and fills an important void.

About this title

Review:

“Morals and Consent will change the field of applied ethics, an amazing and significant feat in an area of research that is already crowded. There is quite literally no other book like this, and Malcolm Murray’s will be the position to respond to. Authors wishing to defend alternative theories in applied ethics will have to answer his many challenges to their theories.” Susan Dimock, York University

From the Author:

Malcolm Murray is a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Prince Edward Island and co-author, with Nebojsa Kujundzic, of Critical Reflection: A Textbook for Critical Thinking.

About this edition

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0773551115
• ISBN 13: 9780773551114
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416